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Like many things, the cost of potato chips is up. Ten years ago, the average price of a bag of chips was less than $4.50. Now, it’s $6.50.
While potato industry experts blame inflation, the increasingly hot weather also plays a role.
An Erie County potato(chip) farm
It hasn’t been too hot in Waterford, Pennsylvania, near Lake Erie, this summer. That’s been good for Kevin Troyer’s potato crop.
A truck pulled alongside the barn on his farm.
“These loads are coming in fresh out of the field. You know, there’s a load right there that just pulled in,” Troyer said.
He watched as a truck unloaded a haul of Atlantics into his conveyor system. It’s an older variety, with white skin and starchy flesh, used for making potato chips. Rocks and dirt are eliminated, the potatoes are washed twice, and then workers sort out any too small or damaged.
They loaded more than 50,000 pounds of the cleaned and sorted potatoes onto another truck that will drive them three hours to the Snyder’s of Berlin factory, southeast of Pittsburgh (which has changed ownership but continues to make chips under the same name.)
“That’s one of the big bills with potatoes, hauling them around,” Troyer said. “Hauling them to the chipper, hauling them from the field, hauling the seed in from — We get a lot of our seed from the upper Midwest.”
Transportation accounts for around one-third of the cost to produce potatoes, according to Troyer.
Pennsylvania leads in snacks
Pennsylvania is not one of the larger potato-growing states now, like Idaho, and Washington. The US Department of Agriculture stopped tracking data about potato growing in the state nearly ten years ago because it had gotten so small.
There’s one aspect of the U.S. potato economy where Pennsylvania is still a heavy hitter, though.
“Pennsylvania is known as the snack food capital of the world,” said Nathan Tallman, CEO of the Pennsylvania Cooperative Potato Growers. “And we have more potato chip factories than any other state in the Union.”
Tallman connects potato farmers with chip-makers. Like the Troyers, he blames the high cost of potato chips on inflation, and a big piece of the rising cost is transportation.
“The chip manufacturers like to get potatoes grown here,” he said. “It’s cheaper to ship potatoes from farms in Pennsylvania to, say, Hanover [Snyder’s of Hanover snack company, based in Pennsylvania] versus coming from Florida, Michigan or Alliston, Ontario.”
Pennsylvania chipmakers commonly import from these places, and the northwest US, because they grow so many more potatoes. The land isn’t as hilly as Pennsylvania, they have bigger tracts of land, a longer growing season, and large-scale mechanized irrigation systems.
Potatoes are tricky to grow
“You’re trying to grow a crop, and the crop is sensitive to weather and water conditions,” said Bob Leiby, who worked most of his career as the Lehigh County Extension Director, focused on potato farmers.
He’s currently an agronomist with Tallman’s potato cooperative. Leiby wants to grow more potatoes in Pennsylvania, but that’s getting more difficult in some parts of the state
Potatoes grow best at daytime temperatures of 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit and stop growing completely if the soil hits 85 degrees.
“We’ve been seeing quite a bit of that. When you have days that are sunny and temperatures in the low 90s, it’s easy to get soil temperatures way up out of the range that tubers will even continue to grow,” Leiby said.
The Pennsylvania State Climatologist at Penn State University confirmed there have been more hot afternoons at 85 degrees or above in recent decades in many parts of the state.
For example, Lancaster County, a potato-growing area of Pennsylvania, now has fifteen additional days each year that hit 90 degrees or above than it did twenty-five years ago. That’s more than two additional weeks of very high temperatures.
“If it’s a month of high temperatures, it’ll [a potato crop] stop growing and not come back,” Leiby said.
Potatoes also require cool nighttime temperatures.
“Nighttime temperatures, below 57 degrees are also very important,” Leiby said.
But even Erie County, the state’s best potato-growing region and where the Troyer farm is located, is getting an increasing number of warm nights. Since the 1980s, Erie had 15 additional nights when the lowest temperature was still warmer than 65 degrees.
A star among potatoes
“If the climate is changing, and changing kind of rapidly, we have to develop potatoes that are adapted to the new climate,” said Walter DeJong, a professor at Cornell University.
He laughed when he heard that Bob Leiby called him a rock star potato breeder.
DeJong said it’s not sustainable to continue relying on potatoes from Florida and the northwest to supply Pennsylvania chipmakers.
In addition to the transportation and fuel costs, “Do they have the water to sustainably use to grow all those potatoes indefinitely out West?,” he asked. “I think the answer to that is ‘no.’ There’s increasing water use issues in the West.”
The reliance on western potatoes changed when Cornell released a potato called Lamoka in 2011 that DeJong developed. It was named for a lake in New York. DeJong’s goal for this new breed was a potato chip that would maintain a light color when fried.
But it had an unintended, beneficial trait. It allowed Pennsylvania growers who harvested potatoes in the fall to store them through the cold winter months and sell them to chip-makers in the spring.
“Before Lamoka came out, if you were a chipping plant in Pennsylvania and you wanted to make potato chips beyond mid-April, you had to get potatoes from Florida,” he said. “So there was a lot of shipping cost involved in bringing potatoes up from Florida.”
Shipping costs are just one aspect of potato chip prices. There is also the price of cooking oil, fertilizer, labor, and land. But after experiencing food shortages during the Covid pandemic, DeJong thinks it’s important to maintain local potato production, even if it means that chips cost more.
“Potatoes produced out West may be cheaper, but there is some societal value for those disaster years to have production in the northeast as well,” he said.
The question is whether consumers also see that value, and are willing to pay for it.
Read more from our partners, The Allegheny Front.
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